I never thought of it as physical abuse before

[zen_racer]

My brother is 1.5 years older than me, and for my entire childhood until I was in high school, he liked to beat me up.  He just enjoyed being mean, causing pain, taking my things and breaking them.  My mom always let it happen.  She'd get upset with me for not liking when it would happen, and would tell me that I should just put up with it or leave the room because I should know how he is.  Literally, the only time I can remember that she ever stepped in was the first time I defended myself so well that he ran to his room to get away from me.  But I always figured that's just what it's like growing up with an older brother.  Maybe that's what I was told.  It never occurred to me that it was just years and years of constant physical abuse, added on to the other kinds of abuse.

I'm obviously just learning about cptsd, and in the discovery phase of learning about things I've been blocking out or disassociating from.  This one is hard to take.

[Blueberry]

I'm sorry you had to endure that. I went through similar with my brother who is also 1.5 years older than me, plus parents who downplayed it all and or found excuses which I see as AT BEST neglect if not abuse.

When I was first in counseling and later this wasn't seen as abuse because the criteria was that a sibling had to be at least 5 years older. Fortunately the professionals seemed to have wised up. Older brothers don't have to behave like yours or mine! In fact some are protective of younger sibs.

I'm sorry you're feeling the pain of this. 

[zen_racer]

Trigger Warning for this response.

This is making me question so many things, in so many different ways.  In my memory, everything is ... segregated.  Each thing is separate, like a sitcom series where nothing carries over, and every instance stands on it's own without relating to any other episode.  But was the constant physical abuse why I started doing 200 sit ups every other night as a very young child?  Was it just that I wanted to be able to be hit without it hurting as much, instead of caring about exercise?  Was that, plus being hyper vigilant mentally, emotionally, and physically why my metabolism was too fast and caused me health issues most of my life?  Is my inability to see that I have issues regarding safety because I stopped believing safety was real?

I just questioned a lot more, faster than I could type, cried for while, and now I'm already disassociating again.  I'm sorry.

[TheBigBlue]

[NarcKiddo]